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The aim is to bring to light characteristics of the American State, a State classically thought of as weak by authors comparing it to the model of centralized European States. Taking into account comparative studies allows for putting forward several hypotheses on the occasionally paradoxical sequences of State origins and State development. In those studies the State is conceived of not as a counterweight or competitor with regard to certain social relations or typically “non-State” political organizations but rather as closely linked to those organizations due to the conditions governing competition among political parties or arrangements negotiated between the central apparatus and powerful infra-national units. This leads to a better understanding the American federal State as it developed over history, making it possible to identify different variables as characteristic of that State and its formation, and therefore to move beyond the illusion that the State in the United States is absent or weak compared to a single model, the presumably strong, centralized Prussian or French State. Lastly, on the basis of a synthesis of recent American empirical research, the article shows that in the United States the State as rule-producer, normalizing authority and national affairs manager exerts much more influence than is usually thought, through mechanisms that are either unexpected or have simply not been taken into account. The paradox of a weak State whose effects are strong justifies the labor of analytic renewal necessary to understanding the contemporary State.